Canonical to boost Ubuntu usability by tackling “papercuts”

Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of …

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, is launching a new project to improve the usability of the platform. The developers aim to identify and resolve 100 minor bugs that negatively impact the Ubuntu user experience before the release of the next major version in October.

The initiative, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will be implemented by Canonical's new design and user experience team in collaboration with the Ubuntu community. Canonical's design experts have called for Ubuntu users to participate by helping to identify relevant bugs. They are specifically looking for easily fixable bugs that impact the usability of key system components such as the panels and file manager. Canonical hopes to boost the overall quality of the platform by addressing a multitude of subtle issues that developers would otherwise ignore. Many of the improvements that are applied through this effort will directly benefit upstream projects.

Canonical began assembling a team of professional designers last year to lead a broad community-driven usability initiative called Project Ayatana. The new One Hundred Paper Cuts initiative is one of several strategies that comprises Ayatana. Another major facet of Ayatana is Canonical's experimental notification system, which was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04. During this development cycle, the new notification system will receive additional improvements as the design team simultaneously tackles the papercuts.

David Siegel, the developer of the popular GNOME-Do launcher, recently joined Canonical as part of the user experience and design team. In his blog, he describes the function of the One Hundred Paper Cuts project and provides more specific insight into what kind of issues are classified as papercuts.

"If some small usability detail has been bothering you release after release, now is your chance to step up and get it the attention it deserves," he wrote. "If we can find and heal one hundred paper cuts, Ubuntu 9.10 will surely be the most usable release of Ubuntu yet."

Users can participate by reporting bugs and flagging them as papercuts in Ubuntu's Launchpad development site. As Siegel points out in his blog, this is a great way for new contributors to get involved in the process of improving Ubuntu. Users can also help by participating in the Ubuntu 9.04 usability study. If the papercut project is successful, Siegel says, it might be reiterated during future development cycles.

Many of us who are experienced Linux users have become so accustomed to ignoring minor glitches that such problems practically become invisible. The result is that there are a lot of really subtle deficiencies that have long been overlooked by developers but are immensely frustrating to new users. The One Hundred Paper Cuts project looks like an effective way to overcome this challenge and smooth out some of Ubuntu's rough edges.

44 Reader Comments

Maybe they should be doing more, like using the latest kernel and thus pressuring AMD to release a driver that is compatible with the latest kernels instead of screwing over the end user for months. Also I think a BIG usability improvement would be fixing that Xorg memory leak that causes some people to have to restart X every couple days or less!

The graphics stack is undergoing changes where a lot of the current code will be tossed, especially in the memory management area (GEM, TTM).Also, the term 'usability' - I don't think it means what you think it means Hopefully they'll have a look at KDE too, the unusable QuickLaunch is driving me crazy! At least KRunner is improved to the point the environment being bearable.

Originally posted by LavosPhoenix:Maybe they should be doing more, like using the latest kernel and thus pressuring AMD to release a driver that is compatible with the latest kernels instead of screwing over the end user for months. Also I think a BIG usability improvement would be fixing that Xorg memory leak that causes some people to have to restart X every couple days or less!

Wow, I think I just realized why my Mythbuntu box is locking up every 2-3 days.

Linux is general really needs this. Ubuntu may be the most user-friendly distribution, but that doesn't actually mean it's user-friendly relative to just buying a PC or Mac. There have been many improvements, but many also remain.

Originally posted by LavosPhoenix:Maybe they should be doing more, like using the latest kernel and thus pressuring AMD to release a driver that is compatible with the latest kernels instead of screwing over the end user for months. Also I think a BIG usability improvement would be fixing that Xorg memory leak that causes some people to have to restart X every couple days or less!

flgrx is a proprietary driver. If AMD can't cough up the code to make it work, that's AMDs problem not Ubuntu's. There's not a whole lot they can do there.

I go with the radeon Open Source driver from git and install 2.6.30 from the kernel mainline ppa. Works flawlessly.*

*For values of flawlessly that include (I have no 3d acceleration yet but it is coming).

I'd think they'd just sift through launchpad, and pick out the ones that keep coming up. All those "bugs" they disregard since it's really just a beautification or usability thing ... fix 100 of those. It's redundant asking folks for more feedback on this when they've already given it and it's been ignored.

In Ubuntu's favor, I've had more usability issues with Vista than with Ubuntu. Vista got hosed up when they shuffled around where all the OS options are. Ubuntu's stays fairly consistent, even when they swap out some old thing (EG: the taskbar pop-up messages) with a replacement.

Unfortunately, they've gotten a bit sloppy in some of their swap-outs (EG: Pulseaudio), so I'd really much prefer they fix that first. I had to manually jack around with audio settings to get PulseAudio in Karmic to work, since it wanted to default to my on-board sound card instead of the Sound Blaster PCI card I had installed. In past Ubuntu versions, there wasn't an issue, but in Karmic I was only able to resolve this by removing the SB card so the on-board card was the only thing being used. I'd rather they fix stupid things like that then spending time detailing the paint job.

One usability annoyance that still comes to mind is when you install a GUI app package from repo and it doesn't create a "start" menu launcher. Naturally, some packages, like CLI-only, won't need that. But when you install a GUI app, you tend to assume there will be a menu icon installed. It'd be nice that even if the package doesn't auto-create one for you, Ubuntu itself would be smart enough to see that the program uses a GUI lib (GTK, QT, whatever), and create a generic launch icon in the menu for you.

SIDE NOTE: Has anyone else noticed that other than Ubuntu or other major Linux distros, there's been a huge decline in Open-Source topics on Ars? Used to be a couple of good articles each week. Now the Open Source section of Ars is barren. Articles seem heavily geared towards Apple, MS, and Commercial software these days.

* add new kernels as options in the official repos (to avoid the Jaunty disaster with Intel regressions from happening again)* make keyboard shortcuts consistent (like with Windoze)* focus on stability and performance instead of things like faster boot times (who cares if another 2s is shaved off?! Many of us only reboot once a day if that!)

Originally posted by LavosPhoenix: Also I think a BIG usability improvement would be fixing that Xorg memory leak that causes some people to have to restart X every couple days or less!

Is that what's causing me to get those "Allowable limit of flexible X servers reached?" or whatever message after a few days of switching between user accounts? God, I hate that! I'm using Hardy and it's been a problem for me since Gutsy. Posted a thread about it on the forums but didn't get any information or fixes. Happens with both ATI and Nvidia hardware, even.

Originally posted by Tundro Walker:I'd think they'd just sift through launchpad, and pick out the ones that keep coming up.

That's exactly what they are doing. They are asking users to find existing bugs in Launchpad and mark them as "also affects" the One Hundred Paper Cuts project. You can also report new ones if you find one that isn't already in Launchpad.

I can list plenty of applications which break sound for one another. PulseAudio was supposed to be the panacea for this, and it isn't.

Sound is something that "just works" in both Windows and OSX, and is still stuck in the 80s for Linux.

I bet all of these applications are proprietary, too.

Hrm. I don't recall anybody claiming PA was a panacea for anything. It's no silver bullet. To fix audio problems in Linux requires a huge amount of work and unification process. PA is just step in the right direction and there is going to have to be more work done to even just get PA right.

quote:

* add new kernels as options in the official repos (to avoid the Jaunty disaster with Intel regressions from happening again)

Ya that is the entirely wrong direction... What you want is to have _one_ kernel that works for as many people as possible.

Wheither you realize or not what your saying that people should have the choice of different kernels (all probably broken in slightly different ways) and make them select the one that is not broken in a way that affects them negatively. That's a wrong even though it has been a traditional Linux approach to fixing problems in the past.

quote:

The graphics stack is undergoing changes where a lot of the current code will be tossed, especially in the memory management area (GEM, TTM).

The Intel drivers hit their low point in January of this year. That was right in the middle of the transition period.. With the latest bunch of drivers in Ubuntu you have these options to select with your driver:

That is driver hell and is a huge mess but was required so that the driver would work with older kernels and newer kernels.

That is, in fact, a result of the 'stable ABI' policy for X Windows drivers and Kernel userland. The X people want to make sure that their driver interfaces are supported across multiple versions and the kernel folks want to make sure that their userland interfaces are supported for multiple kernel versions. This is so people can back port newer X drivers to older stuff and use new custom kernels with old stuff. That sort of thing is why kernel developers do not want a stable _internal_ interface for drivers. It makes progress very difficult.

With the transition to DRI2 mostly done the next set of Intel drivers will be _only_ DRI2 + UXA + KMS and no other configuration will be supported. This helps massively with bug fixing and hopefully cutting out huge amounts of code will improve performance.

Next up to bat is going to be the Radeon open source drivers.

The Radeon, right now, has a OpenGL driver rewrite in the MESA development repositories. This rewrite will update the driver code for all Radeon video cards from R100/R200 era to R500 era video cards. The kernel also is introducing KMS for Radeon drivers as well as the TTM kernel graphics memory management for Radeon DRM drivers so that you can have full DRI2 support.

This is essentially what the Intel folks have just gone through and Radeon is next. As a result of this transition Radeon will now be able to support some very fundamental and not-so-modern-but-as-yet-unsupported-features such as FBOs. Also this transition lays the ground work so that OpenGL drivers for R600 and R700 era cards. Its a depedency for their support.

And, ultimately, all of this is preparing the way for Gallium support. (which Intel users will see first)

So look forward to some pain for those users of open source radeon drivers in the either 9.10 or 10.04 (or whatever)

I have to agree with the stability issue. I never had problems with Ubuntu/Linux on 1ghz+ machines, but when I put CLI-only on a 233mhz, it tended to crash every other day. Maybe it was the Xorg bug, even though it was CLI? I just noticed that as the machine kept going, the mem would eventually just load up and eventually machine would crap out. I don't think that's something the Ubuntu folks should tackle. Sounds more like a kernel issue. There's already folks working on different packages, kernel, etc ... Ubuntu dev's job is to make the integration of all that into the distro smooth. So, I can see why they'd focus on integration/usability & boot times instead of digging into other peoples' code projects.

I'm so happy they're doing this. I recently started using Linux (around a year ago) and there's always something in the UI that seems amiss. Minor issues (like sometimes a menu item not being activated on first click, etc.) make the UI feel clumsy and unresponsive.

Originally posted by LavosPhoenix:Maybe they should be doing more, like using the latest kernel and thus pressuring AMD to release a driver that is compatible with the latest kernels instead of screwing over the end user for months. Also I think a BIG usability improvement would be fixing that Xorg memory leak that causes some people to have to restart X every couple days or less!

Yes, because I want the members of the development team that only know how to do interface-level work anywhere near the kernel.</sarcasm>

Think of this as the "hey, we have interns!" project, and it makes much more sense. Scrape through the bug tracker looking for the little annoying things the "real" developers have to time for, and get the intern to start clearing them off.

The only issue I have really had with ubuntu is with Xorg. I hooked up a second monitor and set up Xorg and all is fine when I am logged in. But on the Log in Screen, it is all kinds of messed up. The two screens are mirrors of each other and the text in the username/password boxes are a 72pt font and the menus are so hug, you can't even see the options to them.

Not sure if that is an Unbuntu, Xorg, or my crappy laptop/driver thing, but it is sure annoying.

The other problem I have had is with Xorg again. There are times when my task bar won't show windows that are open in the second monitor. If I happen to minimize the application/window, it is no longer selectable using the task bar.

I built a spare computer to run Ubuntu, and rebuild it every time I end up with surplus parts from other upgrades. It's cool, but it's always something compatibility wise. Or some show stopping bug that you have to live with till next release, then the next release fixes it but breaks something else. Sometimes it's my fault for using prehistoric parts, other times it's really out of my hands.

Latest problem is sound. The Nforce 4 onboard sound just won't work, period. I gave up on it after putting the better part of 2 days into fiddling with it. It took me about that long to get sound working on the first iteration of that computer, using an ISA soundcard I must have bought in the mid 90s in an old KT7 raid mobo. I thought the NForce 4 integrated sound would be hassle free in comparison.

It's cool as a hobby, and as a spare for downloading, and their are plenty of little touches here and there that are superior to XP, but I don't think I'd install it on someone else's computer for all the support headaches it'd cause me. Which is a shame, when it works, it's more than sufficient for most of my friends or family.

Originally posted by jwbaker:I bet all of these applications are proprietary, too.

For a lot of (most?) people, having something that "just works" is a lot more important than some abstract concept (most people are not software developers - and of those that are, hacking the kernel of their OS is not necessarily a desirable weekend project) of software freedom.

Originally posted by jwbaker:I bet all of these applications are proprietary, too.

For a lot of (most?) people, having something that "just works" is a lot more important than some abstract concept (most people are not software developers - and of those that are, hacking the kernel of their OS is not necessarily a desirable weekend project) of software freedom.

Those people can just use Windows. There's no reward for the incurious in the Linux ecosystem. They will just be frustrated.

Originally posted by jwbaker:I bet all of these applications are proprietary, too.

For a lot of (most?) people, having something that "just works" is a lot more important than some abstract concept (most people are not software developers - and of those that are, hacking the kernel of their OS is not necessarily a desirable weekend project) of software freedom.

Those people can just use Windows. There's no reward for the incurious in the Linux ecosystem. They will just be frustrated.

There is one reward for the incurious in the Linux ecosystem.

Free. Not freedom, but cheap. Let an OEM shoulder the burden and pass the price savings onto the user.

@jwbaker This is your personal opinion, but it obviously won't help linux grow. I know what you mean, I think, but a default configuration that "just works" does not mean you can't still tinker with your system afterwards and install all the custom stuff you want. I think a good example of this is os x, (though it could be better) there your first install just works, but after that I can hack the crap out of my system, compile all the oss programs I want, whatever (unless they have obscene gnome dependecies, then it's just not worth it). In linux this obviously would work even better, but this does not mean you can't have a default system that just works. Also, contrary to mac os x on linux you are ofc always free to use another distribution if you don't like ubuntu's approach. In fact, with a statement like that, I wonder why you still use ubuntu in the first place (if you do)?

Originally posted by Tundro Walker:...One usability annoyance that still comes to mind is when you install a GUI app package from repo and it doesn't create a "start" menu launcher. Naturally, some packages, like CLI-only, won't need that. But when you install a GUI app, you tend to assume there will be a menu icon installed. It'd be nice that even if the package doesn't auto-create one for you, Ubuntu itself would be smart enough to see that the program uses a GUI lib (GTK, QT, whatever), and create a generic launch icon in the menu for you....

Please file bugs*! I haven't hit one of these cases for a couple of releases. As they're trivial to fix on a per-package basis, and an autogenerated menu item would be decidedly poor, just writing a proper .desktop file for each app is a much better solution.

* If you have filed bugs... .desktop files are trivial to write. Maybe you could contribute one? :/

Those people can just use Windows. There's no reward for the incurious in the Linux ecosystem. They will just be frustrated.

That's a shame though. It has a lot to offer to pretty much anyone when it works. And presumably some part of the people taking the time to write open source software want it to be used as widely as possible.

Fix the sound, been using ubuntu starting with 6.10 and have never loaded a single release that the sound has worked right, got 7.10 to fully work after days of trying and now its not supported, when audacity, music play and Internet sound work all at the same time I will be a happy camper.

Seriously.. Do they think all the little tiny usability issues are what's hampering adoption by the general public? GNU/Linux desktops are fine.. I ran a cybercafe with 20 to 25 GNU/Linux desktops 6 years ago and numerous customers doing online games to word processing had virtually no problems with the desktop.

Here's a major problem: An ordinary user cannot find an interesting or useful application on the web or in any kind of store, run it, and learn how to use it. Instead, he's referred to the package management system on the distribution he has installed and told it's the better way of installing packages. What's wrong with this? (1) He hYou cannot just find a software program for "Linux" and run it. No.. no.. You have to get it from the repository of your currently installed distribution. If it's not available for the specific version of the specific distribution you have, you are 99% chance screwed (if you are a normal desktop user). Even the as nothing but a short little description that usually isn't very good of what it is.. install it and may or may not even know where to go to run it thereafter and if when found, it's kinda cryptic as to what it is and/or how the heck it works; (2) You read about fabulous Linux programs on the web but can thereafter only hope that the latest version is available for the specific release of the specific distribution of GNU/Linux that you have installed...

The solution (not that anyone will listen to me): Let a GNU/Linux distribution focus on being a good platform for software for GNU/Linux and let applications each be their own distribution. Make their packages distribution neutral. This is the only way GNU/Linux will ever have "killer applications", otherwise it's just the stuff included with this or that release of distribution whatever.. And, I'd make an application as an application--not a software program. Each should be a complete product: Good web page describing the product, what it does for you (it may be a combination of several programs that are commonly used together), a support system (maybe wikis and chat channels), and tutorials. Let somebody feel like they have something when they get it--so they can think, "Hey, I've got this and its supposed to let me do x, y, and z!".

GNU/Linux desktops are highly intuitive.. They long have been. Software programs tend, however, to be more cryptic.. and they are simply not completed products just because they've reached some benchmark in code quality. Do some experimentation, when a user wants to do something users commonly do--what is their experience? I am not talking about a user who is sitting in front of an Ubuntu desktop computer--but a user considering what computer he/she wants to get. If it's, "I really like this or that program but it only runs on this kind of computer.." that's a start. When it becomes, "If you want to run any of these cool programs, you'll need to have an Ubuntu computer instead of just Windows." then you're really getting somewhere.

You will NEVER GET THERE with a GNU/Linux distribution. You can only get there with application distributions for GNU/Linux. That said, if your company is selling the cool applications for GNU/Linux then customers are largely going to be interested in the Ubuntu you are selling, too.

Also, although there are a number of good and useful programs that are actually in the package distribution system, probably 90% of them are useless muck. Much of it is ancient stuff that they keep in because someone somewhere used it as a tiny part of some important software.

An example: here's the second listing in Ubuntu's Synaptic Package Manager:3270-common--Common files for IBM 3270 emulators and pr3287

IBM 3270 terminals were made in 1972! Yeah, that might be useful...for my great grandfather!

Meanwhile I'm trying to find a PDF reader that lets me fill out pdf files that have fillable forms (as many legal forms are made), and all I get are a bunch of low level pdf drivers and an almost completely unusable, buggy, low-level program called pdfedit.

IBM 3270 terminals were made in 1972! Yeah, that might be useful...for my great grandfather!

I used Debian packages for the 3270 terminal in my last job. It was necessary to communicate and monitor the machine I was tasked with dealing with. It's still relevent to this day for some people. If your job does not deal with mainframes then it's not.

Also I really doubt that the 3270 packages are part of the main repository. Also each package has catagories that it fits into so your not forced to go through them alphabetically.

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There are two catagories for people that are best served by Linux.

1. Professionals that use Linux or any other systems. Most largish corporations have mixed networks, meaning that they do not depend soley on Microsoft Windows. Linux has the best compatibility with all systems when compared to all systems, including Microsoft Windows and other Microsoft software.

2. People who do not know much about computers and need basic functionality.

I've recently setup a old laptop with Debian for a friend of mine. She has very little knowledge of any computers. She needs the computer for 3 tasks:* Job hunting* Facebook* Hulu and other flash video

The Gnome desktop in Debian serves her perfectly in most respects. I set up the computer, optomized the drivers, installed Flash and other codec supports. I installed the set of programs that I think that she would most benefit from and gave her about 45 minutes worth of instruction. So far it has worked out fine.

Saved her ass, too, as one night she bombarded by what she thought was her antivirus application showing that she had all sorts of viruses installed. This was the Anti-virus 2009 web social engineering trick. No less then 16 times did she attempt to install the 'anti-virus software'.

She does not have root password and sudo is disabled, btw. So even if it was a Linux-targetted attack and not a Windows targetted attack it would of had very little chance of spreading outside of her user account. It still could of done damage to her from there, but it would of been relatively easy for me to find and delete.

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The people that Linux is bad for are 'power users' that tend to know little about computers, but are very focused on a specific computer related task and have put lots and lots of effort into making Windows work for them for that specific task.

Stuff like a person who is Excel junky and uses a lot of Excel features to do wacky things. People who do a lot of very intense photoshop stuff. A programmer that has put a lot of time into learning Visual Studio stuff. Hard Core gamer. etc etc.

Linux will work for them for most stuff, but for the specific thing they care about then it will probably lack features, but even if it didn't it would almost certainly require a lot of relearning.

For fsck's sake! This bug was already known 1 month before 9.04 was released and was causing *severe* data corruption, regardless of filesystem format, on 64-bit machines with an ICH8/ICH9 chipset. How's THAT for a bug that "negatively impact the Ubuntu user experience"?

IBM 3270 terminals were made in 1972! Yeah, that might be useful...for my great grandfather!

I used Debian packages for the 3270 terminal in my last job.

Grandpa! How'ya doing???

Seriously, if the Ubuntu community wants to expand their user base, they should look at the most common uses for personal computers (not just present day Linux users or really odd-ball one-in-a-million uses like the one you mention above) in the home and in the office, and then concentrate on writing applications to meet those needs. I'd be willing to bet that the typical Linux user doesn't even know what typical home users use their computers for.

For my Mom it is creating greeting cards. Yes, you can do this with Linux, but that isn't the point. You can't do it the way she wants to do it. There's an enormous difference.

Originally posted by peatrap:Fix the sound, been using ubuntu starting with 6.10 and have never loaded a single release that the sound has worked right, got 7.10 to fully work after days of trying and now its not supported, when audacity, music play and Internet sound work all at the same time I will be a happy camper.

While I appreciate that sound issues are not uncommon, as a counterpoint I'll say that I have four actively used Linux workstations (Debian testing Dell Precision, Debian 5.0 "Lenny" IBM Thinkpad, Ubuntu 9.04 Dell Latitude laptop, and CentOS 5.3 on an HP desktop) and none of them currently have or have ever had sound issues. On these four machines, sound does what I need it to do out of the box and has never broken during an upgrade.